[rant]
And we get JSR-311 because "Correct implementation requires a high level of HTTP knowledge on the developer's part." (pointed out by Dan and Dave) This is where we have reasonably good developers trying to design software for presumed-incompetent developers which will in fact be used unhappily by basically competent developers.
Contrast this to other tools such as IDEA which made the shocking assumption that programmers were smart and knew how to program, or to Rails which has been designed and written by good developers for use by... themselves.
[/rant]
That is actually an interesting idea. I know of only a couple developer-targeted projects which have been smashing successes where the goal has been "easy enough for not-very-good developers to be productive with." Those are things like PHP and VB. In the PHP case I know of a lot of heated discussions about features to include and exclude, such as purposefully resisting namespaces. It seems like a stupid thing to choose to do, but when large numbers of your users think in terms of dynamic web pages, not applications, it matters.
On the other hand most of the successful, technically and popularly, open source projects I can think of were designed specifically for use by the people writing the software where others have been welcome to use that software as well.